This song is the last song on my 2012 album, Black Crow excluding the instrumental piece “Stars/Dawn” which closed the album and brought it full circle, connecting with the opening piece “Stars/Dusk,” a practice I picked up from a lifetime of listening to classic Pink Floyd albums. (Darkside of the Moon begins and ends with a heartbeat. Wish You Were Here opens and closes with “Shine on You Crazy Diamond.” The Wall begins and ends with a spoken sentence which ends on the first track of the album and begins on the final track, the exact quote being, “Isn’t this where we came in?”)

I had originally intended to record this song with a much more sparse arrangement that would have featured a single snare drum played with a brush, strummed acoustic guitar, and bass. Instead, there was no percussion featured at all, and I used a finger picked acoustic guitar arrangement with piano and a variety of synth sounds which were coaxed from my Casio keyboard. The closing instrumental section was an overlay of five electric guitar parts and turned out perhaps a bit clumsier than I had intended. Like the rest of the album, this song was recorded on my Tascam 2488 Neo, a digital recording device that served as my introduction to anything approaching a real recording workstation. I recorded this in a small, messy makeshift studio I set up in the bedroom that had previously belonged to my recently deceased uncle in the house that my great-grandfather built in the tiny town of Pennington Gap, Virginia, where I grew up.

As for the lyrics, I am always reluctant to go into detail about exactly what a song’s lyrics are about as I feel that there should be some amount of interpretation left to listener. Like the rest of the album’s lyrics, there’s a lot one can read in about death as the songs that made up Black Crow were all to some degree a reaction to the death of several family members a couple of years earlier. Suffice it to say that there are also hints of my own Christian Universalist, Catholic-leaning beliefs along with shades of my deep reverence for the Buddhist tradition (“Christ and his mother set beneath the Buddha’s tree. . .And the sins of all mankind were cast into the sea”) as well as my love for my then-girlfriend, who is now my soon-to-be wife.

Take a listen, and I hope you enjoy it.

You can download the album, as well as more of my music, from rancegarrison.bandcamp.com or at https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/black-crow/id538278042?uo=4